In this insightful podcast episode, senior U.S. defense analyst Andrew Jensen joins hosts Ray Powell and Jim Carouso to break down cognitive warfare—the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) key tactic for shaping perceptions, decisions, and narratives to achieve strategic goals without traditional military conflict. Leveraging his deep knowledge of Sino-Russian relations and information operations, Jensen explores how cognitive warfare targets human thought processes before, during, and after battles. Discover why the CCP invests heavily in these methods, drawing from its revolutionary history, and how they play out in the Indo-Pacific region, including the South China Sea, Taiwan, and beyond.

Jensen defines cognitive warfare as the strategic manipulation of how individuals, adversaries, and societies think and perceive reality. Unlike the cyber domain's focus on "down code" (technical infrastructure), cognitive warfare operates on the "up-code" of human cognition to preempt and control battlefields. The CCP deploys this through its "Three Warfares" doctrine: public opinion warfare (crafting narratives), psychological warfare (influencing morale and self-perception), and legal warfare (exploiting international rules for advantage). These tactics blur together, with roots in early CCP strategies to dominate discourse and erode opposition.

In South China Sea disputes, narrative warfare pushes CCP sovereignty claims like the nine-dash line to overshadow competing views, while psychological warfare boosts national pride through initiatives like tourist cruises to disputed islands. Legal warfare selectively ignores rulings, such as the 2016 arbitral decision, and enforces unilateral zones to confuse global norms and intimidate neighbors like the Philippines and Vietnam. Examples include one-sided environmental declarations in contested waters, which validate claims for Chinese audiences and heighten regional tensions.

Beijing masterfully targets societal fissures in open societies, amplifying issues like U.S. military bases in Okinawa or political divides in the Philippines and Taiwan via social media bots and fake accounts to create doubt without direct attribution. In Taiwan, after the overt backing of the pro-unification Kuomintang backfired and strengthened the independence-focused Democratic Progressive Party, the CCP pivoted to covert co-optation of figures like retired officers. In Southeast Asia, these efforts aim to erode U.S. and Quad influence, positioning China as the region's natural leader while aligning with domestic nationalist narratives.

Jensen recommends countering by injecting diverse perspectives into China through private media, culture, and soft power—outshining overt tools like Voice of America. For the U.S. and allies, building information resilience, avoiding adversarial mirror imaging, and cultivating critical thinking are essential to dismantle CCP narrative dominance.

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